Review of Mindstorms: Children, computers and powerful ideas.

Abstract

Reviews the book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert (1980). The book present a new approach to teaching geometry and physics to young children. The author suggests that educators are currently using computers as instruments for 'drill and practice' rather than allowing children to use computers as a key to reflective and self-conscious thinking. An interesting notion of Papert's is that children who have difficulty with words may become more at ease with grammar once they master the logic of a computer. Using a computer to generate sentences, students gave the computer syntactic structure within which random choices were made from a given list of words. The author's believes that computer education will, in the long run, be cheaper than traditional methods. Perhaps what is needed now is more systematic research to evaluate the effectiveness compared to other computer programs or to the more traditional methods of education. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)